


Steel Whistles

by ZipperDemon



Category: The Tribe (TV)
Genre: Cameos from future characters, Canon Compliant, Canon Rewrite, Jack is a cutie and gets not near enough love, lost moments, pre-history
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 08:57:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18568099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZipperDemon/pseuds/ZipperDemon
Summary: "He stopped, after that, thinking about the way time was passing. Before, it had seemed that if he reminded himself how short of a time, really, it had been, how little of the world had turned since everything went to shit--well, it seemed equally possible to put it back together. In the months that followed Jack stopped remembering the look of the mall with clean walls and bright, fluorescent lighting. Four months, maybe. Five or six. It all started to blur, marked by the tastelessness of canned peaches, the static of radio, the whir of his generator, churning through the very little gasoline he had to put in it."A Tribe retelling through Jack's eyes.





	Steel Whistles

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I watched through The Tribe as a youngin' and recently binged the entire series again on Prime. I forgot for all its ridiculousness how fun the premise was and how endearing the characters are. Jack's always been my favorite--the lovely little grump that he is--and as a warm-up and way of getting back into the writing practice, I thought for fun I'd explore the series through him, making up backstory and missing moments with enthusiastic abandon. Do leave kudos and comments if you like--this fandom is dry and I need buddies!

 

 

 

PROLOGUE

 

It would be a long while before Jack stopped marveling at time passing. _One week ago_ , he’d think, _this was all different. There were people here just wandering around. Sitting on benches. Buying birthday presents._ In these early days he’d trace his fingertips through the dust on the banisters, tune the short-wave radio, eat creamed corn. In those first weeks he’d write down the names of school friends, even enemies, descriptions of their parents’ haircuts and clothes. He wrote down everything he could remember about Mel, whom he adored but who treated him like a pet. And he’d think, _one week ago._

_Two weeks ago._

_A month ago._

_Two months ago._

It would be a long while before it stopped feeling surreal. The way something was the way it was, and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. A kind of regret would overwhelm Jack in these moments--the best way he could articulate it was the feeling, when carrying an overladen bowl of cereal up the stairs, an open bag of chips pinched between thumb and bowl, utensils balanced along the arm, where a sudden trip might occur. For a moment, amidst milk dripping down stair steps and shattered doritos littering the ground, one refuses to live in the reality of that moment, thinking, _this could have so easily not have happened_.

He lingered at home as long as he could. There was a childlike hope each morning that when he woke up, he might find it was all a dream. Only when his brothers’ rooms started to stink did Jack pack everything of value in the house--computers, radios, manuals and handbooks, as well as every battery he could salvage--and struck out for the mall. His father’s keyring, passed to Jack in those last days of relative health, clutched in his hand, sweat loosening his grip on the steel whistle attached to them. If he was picked up by one of the gangs that were forming everywhere maybe he could blow their eardrums out.

It took several trips, stashing backpacks of electronics and clothes and whatever food he figured wouldn’t rot, returning for them under cover of nightfall. The mall was shockingly secure--as Jack knelt and turned the key to the collapsing security grate he uttered a silent thanks for his father, who had walked the four miles himself into the city to close them the night their TVs and internet router stopped working. Things still displayed evidence of verge-of-collapse panic--graffiti, overturned shelves, minor looting--but Jack figured that before the gates had been closed the gangs and layabouts that had swept through here were still laboring, as he was, under the impression that this situation was temporary.

Jack still felt sick when he recalled, early on, his excitement when his brother told him through a coughing fit that school was closed for the third day in a row.

“No teachers well enough,” Duncan said, peering into a recently empty bottle of ibuprofen. “This flu going around is something else.”

“Seems like a good time to take over the school,” Jack quipped. “No more teacher’s dirty looks?”

His brother had pushed the side of his head affectionately. The next day, Duncan was too weak to stand.

In those first few months, Jack could hardly stand to be in the mall, remembering with every turned corner the way it looked with all the lights on, with mothers holding toddlers and squabbling with their in-laws over the merits of buying a discman or a portable radio. He’d spent a good amount of time at his dad’s desk in the security office, flipping through the cameras on the monitor, trying to catch someone picking their nose or shoplifting. Now the computer was dark, the cameras motionless.

Instead, Jack would unlock and slip under the grates, raised just enough for someone small to wiggle through, storing the key in his sock as he ventured out into the city. A few times he went back to his neighborhood and knocked on his old friend’s doors. He even peered through the windows of Mel’s house. It seemed like too much of a trespass to go inside any of these places, though he called their names, threw pebbles at their windows.

_Two months ago, there were kids playing on this street. Dad didn’t even have a sniffle. I was worried about finishing Lord of the Flies before school started._

He walked the sectors, filling his backpack up with whatever seemed useful or interesting. Even long-dead batteries fished from dumpsters, though he kept these separate from the potentially charged ones. He collected almost finished cans of spray paint, too, using them to dye his hair bright red, which he fancied a warrior-like color. He never saw his friends from school. Maybe they’d been evacuated to the countryside. Maybe it’d be safe for them to come back soon, with their parents. Sort this mess out.

Jack sighed. The sun ventured into another hazy, indeterminate sky.

Things were the way they were right up until they weren’t.

 

 

 

Three months in, Jack was beginning to see the wisdom of looting, himself. Cautious explorations into the previously off-limits places in the mall had revealed food stores that would last him a several months, maybe even a year, in addition to what was left over in the food court, but he had every intention of living longer than that. It might take a while for the remaining adults to come to the city and restore order. Jack had every intention of being alive, satiated, and ready when that happened.

There was a bookstore with a small cafe, he remembered, between the mall and his old neighborhood. These types of spots were the most likely to yield spoils, as the big grocery stores and restaurants were looted as soon as the gangs got wise to the longevity of the crisis. Jack circled the bookstore, finding the lock to the staff door knocked askew. From there, with pliers and a paperclip, he was able to wiggle inside.

The cafe portion was smaller than he remembered, and someone had obviously been picking through the granola bars and chocolate that had once sat by the cash. There were wrappers all over the floor. Still, Jack grabbed a few remaining bars and stuffed them in his backpack. He was contemplating the wisdom of also grabbing a tub of ground coffee behind the counter--he didn’t want to stunt his growth, which already, at 13, seemed painfully stunted--when a voice startled him.

“What are you doing with those?”

Jack whirled around. A girl with an upturned nose and sandy blonde hair, his age or maybe a little older, held a small hammer aloft.

“Ah--sorry, I--I didn’t think--”

“Are you a loco?” she yelled, her voice trembling a little.

“A what?”

“A loco!” The girl indicated his hair. “That’s loco colors.”

“This, I,” Jack stammered. He put his hand in his hair, feeling the stickiness of old spray paint. “No, sorry, I just… did this. Thought I’d fit in better.”

(For the past two months, he’d only seen people at a distance, always children, and often with strange facepaint or colored hair).

The girl lowered her hammer. It occurred belatedly to Jack that, though he didn’t have anything like a weapon in his hands, he probably wasn’t in any danger.

“You don’t look like a loco after all, I guess,” she said. When she came closer Jack could see the dirt on her cheeks had been sawed through with tearlines. He offered her a granola bar from his backpack--one of her own, but it seemed to be the thought that counted.

They sat at one of the steel tables of the cafe, reassuringly solid--bolted to the floor, even.

“M’name’s Dee,” the girl said. She pulled her granola bar apart, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. Jack did the same. “My mum worked here, so I came after she didn’t come home from the hospital. I don’t know what I’ll do next.”

To this, there was no possible answer Jack could give.

“What’s a loco?” he asked, after a time.

“You mean you don’t know?”

Jack shook his head.

“They’re bad. What’d you say your name was?”

“Jack.”

“Okay, Jack.” Dee took on the wearied air that slightly older teenagers take with slightly younger teenagers. “You had better find a tribe, because everyone else is. We’re in sector nine, and that’s Loco territory. You don’t want to meet the locos, trust me. They’ll beat you to death and spit on your body.”

Jack almost laughed in spite of himself.

“No--no one’s gone that crazy?”

“Wake up!” Dee waved her hand in the air, gesturing to the overturned shelves, the ripped pages, the wrappers she no longer bothered to collect in a wastebin. “We’re on our own here. No one’s coming to sort this out. And the locos round up strays and sell them for food. Or they eat them themselves.”

Jack was quiet.

“You, Dee,” he said at length. “Are nuts. Absolutely bonkers.”

 

 

 

There was no sense staying in the bookstore. Dee agreed with this, taking only a few moments to round up her hammer, her meager food supply, and a few blankets. Jack decided to grab the coffee after all, and made short work disassembling a few of the appliances in the cafe, storing the most versatile pieces in his backpack.

“No photographs?” he asked. He had a few, in his dad’s old office.

“Nah,” Dee said. “Wanna be able to move light.”

He’d convinced her to come back with him, where he assured her he had a little food to spare. If things were really getting this bad, it wouldn’t hurt to have a partner--someone to monitor the radio, to help him scavenge for food. Dee seemed to know the city.

They darted from alleyway to alleyway, Jack a little lighter on his feet--he thought ruefully that it was the dodging of bullies from his school days that made him nimble. Duncan was right--it was good for his character, in the end.

At the chain-link fence that differentiated Sector 9 and 10, Jack paused.

“Do you hear that?”

Dee lifted the loose netting, shoving her backpack underneath, then worked the rivets in hopes they would give way enough for her to follow.

“C’mon, Jack. We’re exposed out here.”

“No, seriously, that can’t be…”

The more he strained for it the further it seemed. A snatch of _something_ in the air… then gone. Dee pulled three links out, the rust groaning under her urgency. Then--as clear as if it had turned a corner--a police siren.

“Dee, d’you hear that?!”

Jack suddenly felt light-headed. His stomach, twisted so thoroughly into knots these past months that he barely too notice of it anymore, loosened a touch. The adults were back. Order was going to be restored. He could go to school, make something of himself, make his dad proud. Sweat speckled his brow as adrenaline coursed through him. He made as if to move to the sound, only to find his arm captured by Dee’s grip.

“Are you stupid?!”

“Are _you_?!” Jack barked, wrenching out of her hands. “Don’t you hear that?--it’s the adults!”

Dee lunged again, grabbing his backpack. A tousle ensued, ending when she kicked his shin. She thrust the backpack underneath the fence with her own.

“We don’t have much time, you idiot, let’s get under this fence and run.”

She smacked Jack’s hand as he reached to grab his backpack back, scrabbling under the fence. He groaned, clutching the links. His good screwdriver was in there. Dee wasn’t seeing sense.

“C’mon, Dee, stop playing around.”

“We’ve got about point five seconds before they find us, Jack, I’m not waiting around for you.”

She took off at a sprint, somewhat overladen by both backpacks. There was still time to follow. But still--the sirens. The adults. Who cared about some granola bars and a few tools? He let out one more frustrated yell, then hit the streets in the other direction, trying to pin the siren to a specific direction as it wailed in his ears, filling them all the way up, until he was no longer sure they were real, or emanating from the part of his body that pulsed hope in him, stored his optimism.

 

 

 

The five seconds it took to correct his assumptions seemed to last a lifetime. Jack could have painted it, had he the skills, so frozen was the moment he rounded the corner, expecting tall, stable, adult police in fitted blazers and finding, instead--

Instead--

Locos.

They held onto the sides of a graffiti’d police car, whooping and carrying burning torches. The car itself careened through the street, scraping against parked, long-abandoned vehicles, accompanied by teenagers in blades, smashing into each other, overturning trash cans and rattling storefront windows. In the police car, clutching the banisters of a makeshift stage, were two figures smeared with black and red paint, brimming with warlike abandon. The smaller one--a girl, Jack noted in the space between his pulse, which seemed to have stopped--turned her head. Even at a distance, he knew she saw him.

“GET HIM,” she screamed.

The sound was not unlike the screech of a hawk diving for prey.

Just two months ago this street had been one where upper form girls met up to get manicures. And their mothers had coffee together down the street.

Jack bolted, sweat making the key in his sock slip and bite into the side of his foot. The siren pounded into him, spurring him onward until he had enough sense to slip into an alley and dive into a dumpster. His lungs stabbed with every breath. A small part of him worried that he’d somehow broken a rib with the exertion.

In the time he spent waiting to be calm enough to venture home again, night had fallen, Dee was nowhere to be seen, and Jack’s eyes were red-rimmed with tears.

 

 

 

He stopped, after that, thinking about the way time was passing. Before, it had seemed that if he reminded himself how short of a time, really, it had been, how little of the world had turned since everything went to shit--well, it seemed equally possible to put it back together. In the months that followed Jack stopped remembering the look of the mall with clean walls and bright, fluorescent lighting. He climbed through every nook and cranny, mapped every entrance. There were quite a few that had gone unnoticed by tribes in the sector. It seemed everyone was leaving him alone, probably assuming the mall was looted to death anyway. Still.

He even painted the walls, further trashing the place--sometimes to create the appearance of being looted, sometimes out of genuine frustration. It kept him from throwing his radio against the wall. It kept him at least a little sane. He practiced with the levers of the gates, in case he needed to quickly barricade himself in. It was getting too heavy and time-sensitive to keep them shut all the time--if he was followed on his way home, then he could trap whoever came after him, maybe force them to trade for their freedom. Not that he left the mall much anyway. Demon Dogz had made sector 10 their battle ground against the Locos for control of the city, unaware they’d caught Jack in the middle.

Four months, maybe. Five or six. It all started to blur, marked by the tastelessness of canned peaches, the static of radio, the whir of his generator, churning through the very little gasoline he had to put in it.

  



End file.
